Pro v3.1 with optimized performance for Google basemaps & lots more is available

Published on 8. July 2017

After more than 3 months of development and lots of sleepless nights, we are happy to announce the availability of Maps Marker Pro v3.1 🙂

Many special thanks to Thorsten, who although being on a roadtrip through Canada continues adding new features and optimizations for Maps Marker Pro. You can follow his trip and view beautiful photos at https://www.fuelandbacon.com BTW.

So what is new in Maps Marker Pro v3.1?

The highlights of v3.1 are the optimized Google Maps leaflet.js plugin “GoogleMutant”, a recent marker map widget, usability improvements as well as bugfixes and security fixes resulting from our bug bounty program at hackerone.com. For more details about this release please see below.

An update to the latest version is – as always – highly recommended.

Let us know what you think about this new release by submitting a review or leaving a comment below!

If you want to keep up to date with the latest Maps Marker Pro development, please follow @MapsMarker on twitter (= most current updates), on Facebook, Google+ or subscribe to news via RSS or via RSS/email.

optimized performance for Google basemaps

The (abandoned) Google Maps leaflet implementation by shramov is now replaced with the much more performant GoogleMutant leaflet plugin by Iván Sánchez.

Before, an instance of the Google Maps JS API was displayed behind the Leaflet container, and synchronized as best as it could be done. As a result the basemap and whatever overlays are on top were off sync. This was noticeable when dragging or zooming a map.

Now, in order to provide the best Leaflet experience, GoogleMutant uses both DOM mutation observers and L.GridLayer from Leaflet 1.0.0. The basemap tiles are still requested through the Google maps JavaScript API, but they switch places to use Leaflet drag and zoom.

The only disadvantage of GoogleMutant is that it is not supported on Internet Explorer 10 or lower and several older browsers versions (maps will automatically switch to OpenStreetMap for those users). Please note that the current browser market share for affected browsers is about 2% (05/2017) and declining steadily.

If you do not want Google basemaps to automatically switch to OpenStreetMap for those outdated browsers, please activate the legacy plugin at Settings / Map Defaults / “Google Maps JavaScript API”:

new widget “show latest marker map”

With this release we added a new widget, which allows you to easily display the latest marker map in your sidebar:

By default, popuptexts are now filtered using wp_kses() which is also used for default WordPress content like posts and pages.

As a result, only allowed HTML element names, attribute names and attribute values plus only sane HTML entities will be displayed – JavaScript code (which could be used for Cross site scripting – XSS for example) is stripped from output.

If you need unfiltered popuptexts to e.g. execute custom Javascript code, you can disable this option at Settings / Misc / Compatibility settings:

global basemap setting “nowrap”

If this setting is set to true, tiles will not load outside the world width instead of repeating.

Setting set to false (=default):

Setting set to true:

Bounty Hunters wanted!

No technology is perfect, and neither is ours. There will always be things that we can have overlooked. While we can’t avoid having blind spots, we can do something to identify them: We’re calling out to security researchers everywhere to help us find security bugs and security issues in our products.

We offer a $ 10 bounty for valid security bugs (for example simple XSS), with the option for larger bounties for more serious bugs, like for example remote code execution exploits, SQL injection or privilege escalation. In addition, we offer a professional package for Maps Marker Pro that’s valid for 25 domains, including access to updates and support for 3 years (list price: € 499) for each person reporting a valid security bug.

Bounties are paid for source code vulnerabilities, but feel to submit vulnerabilities outside that for an optional smaller bounty. We’ve advertised our bounty hunt on the bug bounty platform HackerOne, where you’ll find a full description of our rewards program with a list of valid targets: https://hackerone.com/mapsmarker_com_e_u

Looking for developers to recommend to our clients for customizations

Are you a professional WordPress developer who knows the ins and outs of Maps Marker Pro? Great! Get in touch, and maybe we can recommend you to customers who want individual customizations or custom developments based on one of our Maps Marker Pro APIs.

Sometimes, you just need a custom made product – and someone you can trust to create it for you.
Photo by Fancycrave [CC0 Public Domain] via pexels.com

We’re working hard on delivering the best mapping solution for everyone. But from time to time, clients want their own special things: Individual customizations of Maps Marker Pro, hand-crafted to fit their unique business case, in many cases involving one of our Maps Marker Pro APIs. In this case, we like to refer them to our trusted network of experts.

If you are

a WordPress developer

an experienced user of Maps Marker Pro

reliable and quick to respond

enjoying working with different clients

available for freelance work

then please send us an email, containing a short introduction of yourself, your skills and experience as well as links to previous works.

If we’re a good fit for each other, we will happily add you to our network and, if something comes up, we will recommend you to customers who’s needs for customizations match with your skills.

We do not want to take any commission – our gain is the happiness of our customers, when we can refer them to someone they can rely on for their further needs.

Security fixes

Since the start of our security bug bounty program on May 19th we have received several vulnerability reports – due to our attention on secure coding and 3 penetration tests in the last 4 years no severe or critical issues were found though. All but the first issue from the list below could only have been exploited by users with backend access – and in most cases with admin users only.

Some additional thoughts why those vulnerabilities were not detected by us so far, although we are doing regular security checks: the attack vector of an admin who e.g. inject malicious code into Maps Marker Pro settings was not completely covered by us so far, as such an attacker would have had direct access to theme or plugin files – making it much easier to e.g. inject malicious code or change database tables directly than to use Maps Marker Pro for Cross site scripting.

Nevertheless although the exploitability of the reported vulnerabilities is low, we take those reports seriously and fixed all of them respectively hardened our entire codebase to prevent future similar vulnerabilities.

Known issues

Geolocation feature does not work anymore with Google Chrome 50+, Safari 10+ and Firefox 55+ unless your site is securely accessible via https

With Chrome 50, Safari 10 and Firefox 55 significant changes to the geolocation support were introduced by the related browser vendors: all applications requesting the current position of the user (not just for Maps Marker Pro´s geolocation feature) are only allowed anymore to retrieve the current position of the user if the site is setup to be delivered securely via https – users will see the following or a similar warning instead:

Update November 2016: since iOS 10 also Safari 10+ now requires https to support geolocation. The implementation is even more strict than with Google Chrome – geolocation will not work for example if there are mixed-content warnings on your site.

So if you need the Maps Marker Pro geolocation featue on your site, it is highly recommended to migrate your site to https. Some hosters already provide free https certificates from letsencrypt.org for example. For configurations needed within your WordPress site in order to configure it to support https, please have a look at tutorials like https://css-tricks.com/moving-to-https-on-wordpress/.

As https has more advantages for your site than just geolocation working again with Google Chrome 50+ and Safari 10+ (like securing the data integrity, sender authentication and user privacy as well as higher Google ranking as https is used as ranking signal), we strongly advise to switch your site to https only if you haven´t done so yet.

If you switched your site to https and still get a geolocation error (like “Geolocation error: user denied geolocation”), please check your device´s location settings if it is allowed for apps/web sites to retrieve the geolocation.

Translations updates

Thanks to many motivated contributors, this release includes the following updated translations:

Please note that translators are also compensated for their contribution – for example if a translation is finished less than 50%, the translator receives a free 25 licenses pack worth €249 as a compensation for completing the translation to 100%.

Outlook – plans for the next releases

We are currently working on a relaunch of our website www.mapsmarker.com which will also feature an updated knowledge base and documentation.

Please understand that we are not able to promise any release dates for new features. We are dynamically aligning our roadmap based on feedback from our users. Anyway we keep the flexibility to add optimizations and bugfixes with rather unplanned minor releases resulting mostly from users feedback.

Please subscribe to this blog (via RSS or Email) or follow @MapsMarker on twitter (= most current updates) if you want to stay up to date with the latest development news.

How to download / update

The easiest way to update is to use the WordPress update process: login with an user who has admin privileges, navigate to Dashboard / Updates, select plugins to update and press the button “Update Plugins”. The pro plugin checks every 24 hours if a new version is available. You can also manually trigger the update check by going to Plugins and clicking on the link “Manually check for updates” next to “Maps Marker Pro”:

If you do not see the link “Check for updates” and are using a version below 1.7, please update manually once by downloading the current package from https://www.mapsmarker.com/download-pro and overwritting the existing plugin files on your server via FTP. This might be needed on several hosts, which use outdated SSL libraries, which prevent Maps Marker Pro from making a secure connection to retrieve the update package from mapsmarker.com. Pro v1.7 includes a workaround for those kind of servers and the following updates should work again as usual. If you are affected and need help, please open a support ticket.

Share your favorite spots and tracks with Maps Marker Pro, the most comprehensive geo-content management system for WordPress with a moral code. We never store your geolocation data and keep up with latest security standards. Start plotting right away and customize a multitude of features as you go. Happy mapping!